Right Royal Harmones

"I'm kind of surprised this hasn't been done more; it's such an obvious way to make music. You have a singer and then another person sings with them and it just sounds so good when the voices blend well together. It seems strange that it's considered a unique thing that's only been done by a few bands.” Eirik Glambek Bøe, one half of the Norwegian acoustic duo Kings Of Convenience, is the first to admit that the music he makes with cohort Erlend Øye really is just about as straightforward and uncomplicated as you can get. It may just be two guys with two guitars, but the hypnotic melodies their combined vocals create really is something very special. While constant comparisons to Simon and Garfunkel are inevitable, and justified, Bøe insists that the '60s legends actually had no direct influence on his music whatsoever. “Yes, there is the similarity of two guys singing together in harmonies so the comparison is obvious. But at the same time I do find it kind of strange because I have not been listening to Simon and Garfunkel, it was not a part of my musical upbringing at all, so it really wasn't a reference point for me in my musical taste.”

Bøe insists that the whole question of musical style was in fact something they both never even consciously considered but simply found themselves naturally falling into. Friends from school, they were initially in 'conventional' bands together before realising they could actually do without everyone else. “When we started playing together it was more just discovering things,” Bøe recalls. “We had this rock band with bass, guitar and drums, but the two of us started to play with just acoustic guitars and it was a surprise for us how much of the band is actually still there when the drummer has gone home and the bass is not there anymore. You can use the guitar as a percussion instrument and with your thumb on your acoustic guitar you can get a pretty good bass line. If you just learn how to break the synchronicity with your fingers you can actually play a bass line and the guitar chords at the same time. So for us it really was accidental how we ended up in this style but it was also a very joyful discovery that you don't need a full band. The sound of our voices together is unique I guess, but that was never our choice. I can't help why my voice sounds the way it does and why Erlend's voice does. But in all that we discovered that hey, we have a sound.”

It's a sound that also perfectly reflects the image of peaceful beauty that most people have of Norway. “I think with our music the most special thing about it is all the silence and tranquillity, and there certainly is a lot of that here,” agrees Bøe. “I just have to leave my house and walk for five minutes and I'm in the middle of the woods and at night there is no sound there and it's pitch black. I've no doubt that I would probably not have been doing this music if I had grown up somewhere else.” So he could have been a bad-arse rapper had he been born in the Bronx? Bøe laughs: “I'm trying to picture myself as that and I have all these images going through my head now! There are ladies dancing whilst not wearing clothes, but I'm wearing a lot of gold!”

Bøe then goes on to explain he firmly believes that location goes well beyond just influencing the style of music that is made but is actually at the very core of an ability to be inspired to make it: “I talk to a lot of young people and they are always talking about moving somewhere else. It seems to be the worldwide trend now, going where the fun is, saying things like I live in Paris and I'm moving to New York next week or I'm here in Berlin for a few months but then I'm going to Tokyo. It seems to me that everyone has this idea that the fun is somewhere else or if they want to develop or want their creativity to blossom they need to go somewhere else. What strikes me though is that usually the music I like comes from places where the band doesn't actually have much fun. It's an important thing to realise; don't just follow the fun. You should work where your creativity will start blossoming and that could be in your boring post-industrial hometown suburb. The reason is creativity has a lot to do with not really feeling satisfied. That's a really important element in creativity.”

Evidence suggests that Bøe doesn't believe that creativity should necessarily result in a huge mass of recordings, though. As they both also have other projects on the go (he with his Kommode band and Øye with The Whitest Boy Alive) they have only released three studio albums in some 14 years as Kings Of Convenience. And Bøe even refuses to confirm that any more will be forthcoming: “We are thinking about new material but it's not being recorded at the moment. I really don't think there is a need for a new album, there are so many bands and there's so much music out there. If you go on Spotify and start listening to all the great music which has been recorded you could be sitting there for years and years. I'm always asking myself why do we want to add even more music into this huge pool of quality which is already out there. We're really picky and if we release something we really feel that it has to be something which deserves to be released and deserves attention.”

The duo do spend a good amount of time travelling all over the world playing live – a factor which together with the infrequent releases Bøe thinks often leads people to think Kings Of Convenience have split up and the side projects have taken over: “It is definitely a full-time band, though. There have never actually really been long gaps. It probably seems like there have been though because we play in South America, Asia, America and Europe. So when we go to, say, Peru, people there say why haven't you been here in ten years and then when we go to Indonesia people are going you haven't been here in four years, were you considering breaking up the band? The thing is, we have actually been active in the band. Our side projects are just that, they just evolved when you collaborate with someone creatively. Besides, I think both me and Erlend would drive each other crazy if this was the only platform for expression!”

The constant globetrotting is now bringing them to Australia for the first time. Bøe states that it is the only part of the world they haven't been to and the question had been there to make it happen for a while. After that things get really crazy on the touring front as Bøe exclaims: “We're playing in London, then we're going to Seoul, then we're going to Moscow and then we're going to Istanbul and Ankara. And that's for a week! It's like touring in the trails of Marco Polo.” There's not much convenience in that!

Kings Of Convenience will be playing the following dates:

Friday 1 February - Laneway Festival, Brisbane QLD
Saturday 2 February - Laneway Festival, Sydney NSW
Sunday 3 February - Laneway Festival, Footscray VIC
Tuesday 5 February - Hamer Hall Arts Centre, Melbourne VIC
Friday 8 February - Laneway Festival, Adelaide SA
Saturday 9 February - Laneway Festival, Perth WA